


What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

by hyphyp



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, M/M, Post-SPECTRE, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 16:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5340587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyphyp/pseuds/hyphyp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“It’s quite a necessary step, you see?”</i>
</p>
<p>  <i>“I see,” said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p>(In which Bond is gone and Q is Q.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

Q raises his hand slowly up into the air above his head, follows with his eyes the extending line of his arm, feels the joints tighten and the wrist strain against the pull of his shoulder. His hand freezes, suspended, and he examines it distantly, like the hypothetical subject of a physics problem. Mass, density, shape – fingers spread out like the boning of a fan – the heavy force of gravity grasping from below and the press of the atmosphere from above.

Q has no sense of aesthetics. To him, his hand is just a hand, or, not just a hand, but a tool, a finely-tuned instrument that must behave according to a set of rules. He knows the immense speeds at which chemical and electrical signals fire in his brain and move through his body, directing the muscles in his hand to move just so (his middle finger gives a little twitch). He knows that if he presses his palm against hot metal like he still sometimes does when he loses focus in the lab (like the way he imagines touching Bond must feel) his hand moves first, retracting before his brain even knows it feels pain. Q knows the intricacies of the human body and the human mind and the way they are constantly moving in conflict and harmony, a big machine, a tiny machine, but. He doesn’t know what his hand looks like to the outside observer.

Pale, he thinks. Bony?

How can there be so few words to describe it, the mechanism of his…well, his survival? Millions of years of beta testing (Q branch’s fond nickname for evolution) and refinement has resulted in this complex, efficient, and, frankly, beautiful system at the end of his wrist. Another thirty years of his brain learning, teaching, corresponding with these outer digits, perfecting repeated movement and fast calculation to more than art or science but to muscle memory – to nature, and all he has to say of it is Pale and Bony?

Q thinks about Bond’s hands. He has never had the chance to study them up close but he has imagined them plenty and has a working mental map of where the calluses should be. He knows the exact pattern of the grooves and wrinkles that swirl across the palm, up the fingers, to the pads. He knows the force required to squeeze the trigger of a gun. And. And he knows that Bond’s hands are sturdy and even, with strong fingers that to him look like steel bars. They should be stiff but Q knows how easily and quickly they must bend, loose but sure of themselves. They should be cold but Q imagines how warm they must be, concealing as they do the feeling furnace of that blazing sun. They should be hard and rough and unforgiving but Q thinks how gentle they must be on the skin of a woman, how tender when needs demand.

But still he looks at his own hand and only sees Pale and Bony.

He lets his hand drop, fall victim to the forces pressing and pulling, and feels the air resist and give and move through his fingers, a cold swish. Butterflies in the Amazon, he thinks. Somewhere in the world right now, Bond is standing in a room with an open window, and a breeze is blowing through. There are goose bumps rising all along the skin of his arms. His brain is oblivious but his body shivers as it meets Hurricane Q.

I have my own kind of power, Q thinks.

Here is the thing about love and loss and mathematics (Q has been ruminating on all three): At first glance you think they’re all restricted, that they have limits, but the deeper into them you dive the more you realize that even endings themselves are beginnings and that every impossibility is itself a possibility. Reality starts quivering all around you. It’s all held together with string and gum and paper clips, with paradox and “what if.” There ought to be a moment when Q stops loving Bond, stops grieving a dead thing that never lived, but he thinks if he starts counting now that moment will come when he runs out of numbers.

Q looks around the empty lab – empty in the sense of people, anyway. It is full of Things and, beyond that (within that), matter itself. And Q’s brain. Q’s brain seems to need extra space recently. It’s been undulating ever since Bond came down here one last time, yo-yoing between sadness and numbness and an agonizing kind of hope that makes him sick with guilt, and each directional thrust it takes sends Q spinning into hypotheticals. It’s making it difficult to concentrate on his work. It’s giving him whiplash.

He thinks about going up to the street and walking to a café for a cup of tea. He’s here long past everyone else has left for the night, has given up attempting to push him away from his desk and out the door. No one would begrudge him a cup of tea (except maybe himself). And if he goes up there, onto the streets of London, there’s a chance he’ll run into Bond because after all he’s somewhere out there in the world and why not London? The chance is very small, infinitesimal, really, but it’s there. According to the Multiverse Theory, there is a universe where that’s just what happens.

According to the Multiverse Theory, there’s a version of this life where Q leaves tonight and finds Bond waiting for him, leaning up against a concrete wall. His face is pointed up, to the place where the skyscrapers hit the black, pressing sky, but he hears Q’s footsteps on the cement and turns and those pale blue eyes are filled with something other than ice and that mouth is filled with something other than teeth – words, perhaps.

“Late night?” Bond asks, in this universe.

“I’ve had later,” Q replies, stopping himself from making some dumb joke about how every night is the same length with the same amount of lateness, although, of course, there’s another other universe where he does make a dumb joke and Bond laughs (but also one where he doesn’t laugh) only he is limiting himself to one universe right now and in this universe there is only a silence filled with promise.

Bond gestures across the street and Q notices now the Aston Martin parked there, absent of damages, at least as is visible from this far away. He looks for Madeleine, but the passenger seat is empty and the promise swells.

“Still in one piece, I see,” Q says.

“Yes, well, fewer car chases. Not as hazardous for the body work, I’ve found.”

“Hmmm. Sound a bit boring.”

“Boring,” Bond repeats. “No, not boring. Different. Like I’ve been on a boat my whole life and now my sea legs can’t quite find their footing.”

“Well, if it’s a walker you want…”

“Ha ha.”

Q doesn’t quite know where things go from there. They must go somewhere, but every time he thinks they’re about to walk toward each other and away, there’s something more to say, some other joke or observation or meaningful silence, until the pair of them have been standing on the sidewalk all night long and are still no closer to bridging the gap between them.

Maybe it’s not possible, he thinks. Maybe there’s no universe where they drive away into the sunset. Maybe there’s only a universe where Q stops grieving sooner, where the bite of it is lessened, where there is nothing to feel at all. Maybe there is just a universe where Q never loved Bond, where they merely passed each other like strangers making eye contact on the street – intimate, brief, and then gone forever. A moment shed like the progress of dead skin peeling off into dust.

And yet there must be. A universe where Bond comes back – tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. Perhaps there’s even one where right now, right this very moment, Bond comes down the stairs, an easy smile on his face, posture relaxed.

“Just one more thing, actually,” he says. “Come have a drink with me.”

But not this universe. The lab is empty. There are no footsteps on the stairs.

Let it be over with, he thinks. One way or another, let it be done. Yet there is always a step further into sadness. And one Q had to suffer. In a billion universes, at least one Q had to be left waiting, so that the others could move on – with or without.

He looks at his hand. Pale and Bony. But alive. What a paradox, to be a finite thing made of infinities, in a universe of infinities, to feel an infinity of love and an infinity of grief.

**Author's Note:**

> What the Tortoise Said to Achilles is a logical paradox by Lewis Carroll which references the paradoxes of motion in which Achilles can never overtake a tortoise in a race. In Carroll's version, Achilles can never prove a simple logical argument to the tortoise because the tortoise continually argues that further proofs are required. A line contains an infinite number of points, and so does a line of thought.
> 
> Here's a paradox: I hate sad stories and unrequited love and yet that seems to be all I write.


End file.
